"Levi Seacer Jr. started playing guitar at the ripe age of six in a small church in Richmond, California at the request of his grandmother who wanted more than the typical organ and piano sound associated with gospel music. Seacer says "I knew the first time I played the guitar that music would be a big part of my life" Little did he know that he would travel around the world to share his musical talents with many of the great artists of our time. One of these artists, in particular, was Prince. He saw the talent in Seacer while Levi was touring with Shelia E., a Prince protege. When the Revolution was disbanded, Prince asked Shelia and Levi to join his new band. Later named The New Power Generation. During Levi's seven year stay, Prince noticed many other talents in Seacer and quickly utilized them. Levi's first post as Band Leader and Musical Director led him to become Staff Producer for Paisley Park Records and finally President of NPG Records. During his term as President, Seacer and the NPG staff marketed, manufactured, and distributed "The Most Beautiful Girl In The World" which has become one of Prince's biggest selling records to date. Also, 1-800-New-Funk, an album featuring various NPG artists had great international success. Independently, Levi has also worked as a producer, songwriter, session musician and music supervisor for such great artists as, The Sounds of Blackness, The Time, Shelia E., Johnny Lang, Tevin Campbell, George Clinton, Barry White, Carmen Electra, The Pointer Sisters, Gerald Alston, Monie, Mavis Staples, Nona Gaye, Elisa Fiorillo, Ingrid Chavez, Martika and many others. Levi is currently starting up his own Entertainment Media Company "Diamond Bridge" With his partner and wife Jonna Jackson Seacer. The first artist Christopher Lawrence is a very talented songwriter and musician out of Minnesota, check him out on myspace/christopherlawrenceband. Levi has received two grammy nominations for his contributions to Prince and the three time grammy award winning Sounds of Blackness. Levi was also voted as one of the 1000 greatest guitarists in the world."

i just can't tell you how badly i want to smoke. i want to smoke ooooooo mmmmmm so badly. i want to smoke like i never smoked. i want to light up and draw one, slow, long drag up into my eye lids, back into my temples. i want to feel warm in my heart, i want to pull it deep inside, i want to sigh the biggest sigh i ever sighed, the head rush of the century, i want to tip tip tip the stem and watch the ashes fall, embers, lit tip steaming, swirling. Night air. Crisp thinking. I want to SMOKE SMOKE SMOKE. i want the weather to cool down, pre-cold september days, welcoming the sunshine, lean back in the lawn chair or float in the pool alone so as not to offend a soul and smoke smoke smoke. i want a book and a cigarette. i want my health and my smokes. i want escape and to not let my kid down. i want my clarity back and i want my lungs too. you mean to tell me we can't figure out how to make that happen yet? Science--Pshaw!!

I'm thinking that the safest and most bearable way to fly without electronics or liquids of any kind is to put passengers under general anesthesia prior to boarding, wheel them on, and bring them to consciousness at landing. No more seats--we fly on gurneys. Surgeon-like Sky Marshals can remain wake in case the pilots get out of hand. The night before travel, no food or water after midnight. Everyone's safe, boredom is no problem.

August 11, 2006

"I had a Karate instructor tell me once that the Japanese word for three is the same as the word they use for 10,000. I can see that Dave Sifry and I shared the same karate instructor."--Shelley Powers

August 10, 2006

So tonight we ate at Fogo de Chao in Buckhead for our anniversary dinner. Never. In. My. Life. Have. I. Seen. So. Much. MEAT! Oh man, what a mouthwatering-delicacy kind of place. What an award winning all-the-meat-you-can-eat kind of place. Awesome salad bar too, complete with those soft balls of mozzarella that you just HAVE TO HAVE when you see them because they're too expensive to buy at the store, plus fresh asparagus, artichokes, roasted peppers, marinated mushrooms, black beans, rice--GET OUT OF HERE THIS IS TOO GOOD!

Then, after you finish loving the salad bar, the gauchos walk around with all kinds of meat on skewers and come up to your table and slice you some (i.e., as much as you want). Top sirloin, bottom sirloin, fillet, beef ribs, pork ribs, lamb, chicken, holy carnivorous carnival batman.

Great service, great food, great place.

Thank you, George, for a wonderful evening. Let's go back so you can slam down some more lamb. (Shhh don't tell jenna we had fun without her!)

August 09, 2006

On August 9th, 1986 I said, "I do." I didn't have a clue what those words would mean going forward--"I do" is something you say retroactively because you have loved someone hard enough and long enough to say it.

My "I do" seems like 5 minutes ago and 150 years ago all at once. I am married to a man I have known for 22 years--exactly half of my lifetime, all of my adult life.

I love you, George. I loved you when I was a kid and I love you now. Holy cow. 20 years. Holy cow. It's fun to look in your eyes and see them smiling, see our eyes saying back and forth to each other: Wow, what? Tee hee. Man.

People tell you when you're 24 and getting married that it won't be easy, that love doesn't solve problems, that you can't live on love. They aren't lying when they say these things. But they also aren't saying to you that love is so many things in one instant:

Love isn't easy and it's breathlessly simple. it doesn't solve problems and it erases everything but itself. you can't live on love and love is living.

Love feels like 5 minutes and 500 years. It's childlike and ancient. It is slicing pain and a way to wholeness. It's layer upon layer upon layer of knowing. Knowing feels like death and is the context for living.

August 06, 2006

Sometimes when I have way too much to do and I get all spaced out and confused, I hurt myself. Not purposely--I just become accident prone. As is such with my broken toe that is STILL mangled and killing me. And as is such today with my ear, because of a story I will share with you.

After the shower I clean out my ears gently with Q-Tips, just to get the water out, and because my hair is longish I wrap it in a towel, right, you with me? So there I am with the Towel Wrapped Hair and the Q-Tip in my left ear when all of a sudden the Towel Wrap unfurls itself and falls off to the left, knocking my arm that's holding the Q-Tip INTO my ear and jabbing the Q-Tip into my ear drum with such a force and shock of pain that my knees buckled. HELP ME MOTHER OF MERCY! OWWWWWWCH!!

I mean that Q-Tip was down my ear canal before the pain receptors in my lame brain understood the severity of the situation and yanked it out, leaving me helplessly wounded. I was blinded from the towel flopping into my face, half bent over from the nausea, and deaf from the stabbing pain across the left side of my head. I couldn't even tell George what happened for a minute or two because anything beyond a whisper reinvigorated the stabbing pain in my ear.

But today context holds its sway, and I am looking down, below the basket on the blimp, and I see the boiling ocean of despair, hate, and war, below; down where I do not want to go, where I do not want to look. And I wonder, does context hold us up, or will context pull us down? Can we skate free above this bubbling turmoil, can we show a way free of hate and conflict: or am I simply delusional in the face of entrenched and unassailable hatred and rancor? Is the Web an escapist enclave or the hope for humanity.

You know I use Qumana. You know I like Qumana. You know the folks at Qumana have been good to me. I tell them all kinds of things about how I use Qumana, and they listen to what I have to say. They don't take all my blabbering to heart. But I tell them what I think could be better, and when I have a point, they say, Oh Okay, and then it happens.

And it's not just me. They're relentless in following conversations from other Q users on how they write and publish online. I love the changes in 3.0 -- like how now we can play with fonts and font sizes, how BubbleShare works with Qumana, and have I said that Q has the best as-you-type spell checker in the biz?

By now everyone(?) knows that Qumana can post to all of your blogs, across various blogging platforms -- like Blogger and Wordpress and TypePad -- from a single, Qumana window. No more jumping from platform to platform to blog THEIR way--you do it YOUR way in Qumana -- Q does the work of posting it to the right blog in the proper blogging tool.

Like anything I use a lot, I find other things to do with the tool beyond the straight 'user experience' -- and yeah, i punk Qumana from time to time.

Fantastic HTML Editor for Gated Social Spaces - MySpace, BlogHer (drupal), and More

You may or may not know this, but if you send email or bulletins in MySpace, or if you blog there, you have to enter your writing using HTML. Ever notice those MySpace profiles that are ONE BIG PARAGRAPH and look like Hemingway puked vodka on the screen? Yep--those are the folks that don't know a paragraph tag could save us all a lot of trouble. Same folks that haven't learned the 'a href' secret of making a hypertext link. And I'm with them. WHY in 2006 should we have to enter our words into someone eles's service using HTML? Hey, give us a break. Typing in straight HTML is a drag. It zaps the flow.

I enter copy on my MySpace page using Qumana's "Source View." Let's say I'm writing an email in MySpace. I write my stuff in the WYSIWYG window of Qumana, format it there, and when I get it how I want, I click the source view tab and copy and paste it into the MySpace email. The formatting is perfect every time. I do the same thing with my BlogHer posts. For whatever reason, we have to enter HTML manually in our posts--I use Qumana to do it, same way I do for MySpace. Now, Qumana is compatible with Drupal, but something about the team blogging aspect of BlogHer has me confused on getting it post automatically to my BlogHer blog. It's nearly as easy to write and format in Qumana and copy the Source View into drupal anyway.

Tagging's SO EASY

I never tagged before I started using Qumana. I still don't quite understand it beyond technorati, never took time to learn about delicious--don't even know where the dots go in delicious--BUT when I first started using Qumana I noticed this TAG button. I pushed it. It said, enter tags separated by commas, so I started doing what they said. Bam --sticks tags RIGHT IN THERE, and you can enter multi-word tags, which I couldn't figure out how to do before. Something about a plus sign.

Then I got thinking, why should MySpace blogging lock users into a specific set of 15 or so tags? (That's what "categories" are in MySpace: they're tags on technorati.) SO maybe you want to tag something with "Dog Collar" over in MySpace, and you can't do that with the pre-fab tags/categories they give you -- tags like "romance and relationships" aaaah! To get around the pre-fab tags, all you do is open Qumana, click TAGS, enter your tags, click the Source View tab, and copy and paste the HTML for your tags into your MySpace blog.

NOW you have the best of both worlds--the gated community tags of MySpace AND your freeform personal tags from Qumana. Niceeee.Ads with Posts Wherever You Go

Ads in MySpace? You can't do that! Yah well, it's my blog, and I don't know all the ins and outs, but I can put keyword ads in MySpace using Qumana in about 1.5 seconds. Just type your post in Qumana, insert a Q-Ad by clicking the Insert Ad button, the insert your tags, and finally copy the text in Qumana's Source View into your MySpace blog. Bingo--Your post is formatted, tagged, and even has an ad, all using one copy-and-paste from Qumana. NICE options to have.

So that's some of what I wanted to tell folks who have asked, what do you do with Qumana? I do some of what I'm supposed to do, and some of what I'm not. ;-)